skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just wanted to clear up that this isn't my list, I ran across this article and thought it was a good read and wanted to share it with the community.

Like previously stated, it's hard to put into perspective running a company with just 10 points. Besides, everyone and their grandmother always publishes a "top 10" list. It was refreshing that someone put in the time to lay out such a vast article of all the lessons they've learned. And with 90 lessons, I can be rest assured that this is truly their own experience and not something pulled from other articles to make for good content.

It's a good article to read through and catch yourself nodding at the points that resonate and pick up a few key points of reference for your own startup.
> If you are in the right parts of the world and have a little skill behind your name, you can easily make $50/hr as a farmhand.

I would be interested in more information about this. Which parts of the world, farming what, what skills make a good farmhand, and is there any public data that I could look at to look at trends?
I think the scene is more akin to someone hanging the victim upside down and shaking him until all his money falls out. Then before he leaves he takes the victim's asthma inhaler and then kicks the victim's dog for good measure.

SEE YOU AT SCHOOL TOMORROW SPOTIFY
I've always prefered to retrain myself instead of using abbreviations because I was afraid I would need increasingly more of them because of the abbr crutch. However I have never heard of this happening to anyone. Does anyone have any experience with this?
I seem to recall iPhone 1.0 being called a $100 million dollar project in some Wired article. They were several hundred people (not thousands), working together for about 2-3 years. That seems sensible, and the numbers seem to add up.
Elon Musk’s SolarCity Plans IPO
I hear you, I don't think the change is being wrought by any magic bullet where programs write themselves, what I'm seeing is that more folks are going into programming than durable programming jobs are being created. (I use the word durable because there are lots of short term requirements.)

So this is how I look at the health of the market:

1) Does any programmer have their choice of jobs? (which is to say bargaining power when changing jobs)

2) What is the median unemployment time for programmers?

3) How are the first two mediated by contract vs full time work?

4) What are the median salaries?

What I've been seeing since the more recent depression is that unemployment median is staying fairly low but that is being achieved by an increase in the number of folks doing contracting work. Full time work (and that includes health benefits which become significantly more expensive for the 'over 50' programmer as a contractor) is getting harder to find.

As with most markets it is more clear on the 'mediocre' programmers (where mediocre is a function of code productivity) Another thing I'm seeing is salary erosion, which is to say that engineers taking lower salaries at large companies to stay employed. That also indicates a switch in the 'bargaining power' of companies looking for programmers vs the available programmers.

The sequence I've seen a number of times now with acquaintances are flat to negative salary growth when leaving one job and moving to the next. Some folks spent a year or two consulting looking for that position that would be a net gain on their salary growth.

From an economist's point of view if prices are flat to trending down it signals a shift in power from the seller to the buyer.

Those are the signs I'm seeing, would love to hear other's experiences on whether or not they think the market is saturating or not.
I said this when it first came out, I'm not going to curl down and run an arbitrary script from the web. Package it like everyone else does.
Some advantages of static typing show up in programming in the small. Errors in forgetting to check for null/nil/None are a common class of errors that are caught by many static type systems. Switch/match statements that leave out possibilities without providing a default (especially if a new value is added to an enum) are also common errors that are caught by some type checkers.

One hidden (and seldom discussed) feature of static type systems is that in multi-team projects, they can enforce and document abstraction layers between teams. I've even seen static type systems act as impartial arbiters when an argument arises as to if a given change broke one side of an abstraction barrier, or if the change merely exposed a latent silent bug on the other side of the abstraction barrier.
I may get downmodded here since I'm drawing upon vague memory only, I had the impression that Zynga from an employment perspective was run more or less like a slave ship. Surely developers working under a terrible management environment has some impact on a company's ability to recognize and quickly adapt to market changes ?
You think Google have had 1000+ people on Chrome for the past four years?

The marketing bit is a bit special since they don't actually spend any money by showcasing Chrome on google.com.

Edit: They do spend lots of money to get it pre-installed on new PCs, though.
bonus points if the company was trying to adapt and evolve and innovate instead of clinging to a pre-internet business model.

I agree with your basic point, but I really hate this argument -- it's a "blame the victim" justification. Companies deserve to have their IP stolen because they aren't adapting to technology that makes it easier for IP to be stolen?
This is an incredible article, and I would upvote it 100 times if I could.

I really wish I had something more insightful to say about it... but it's just absolute gold, and better than 99% of the "founder advice" posts I've ever seen on HN.

Seriously, this deserves to be a book with 90 3-page chapters.
"Let content producers pay for their own enforcement" - this might be a good method to get companies paying a sensible rate of tax in each country where they operate rather than allowing companies to use semi-legal tax avoidance loopholes.
Google Module Server
> I believe that efforts using trivial examples to show how complexity can be managed via certain abstractions are doomed to fail.

I've received 5 emails and about 10 tweets from people saying, "I think I understand monoids better because your tutorial sat at the right level of abstraction and overhead for me to get."

So, I think I succeeded for 15 people. Which I am pretty damn happy about. Because whenever I write one of these I pretty much assume everyone will misread, misunderstand, or ignore 3/4 of my post. It's just my experience.

People who call the monoid abstraction "confusing" and "complexity for its own sake"... I just have to assume these people can't handle the discomfort of learning new concepts anymore and write them off as unreachable. It's not like I owe them anything. Because I'm pretty sure it's actually not confusing at all, it's just a different perspective.

The real irony is that for awhile I was deep in the OO and Ruby culture and said a lot of these same things. You can find them online if you know where to look. So I understand where these people are coming from and know that without their cooperation, I cannot explain anything at all.
Disagree, more transistors does not help when the transistors are spent on another FPU (not useful for SHA) or additional L2/L3 caches (already fits in cache) for example.
Ask HN - why are there so many planes in the air today?
Ok, this is a satisfy my intellectual idle curiosity, but the UK has had a lot of rain this week, and today has been hot and sunny in the south east - and everytime I look up there are half a dozen or more contrails - new, fresh darts heading to the USA.

Am I just seeing more contrails because the weather is amenable? Am I seeing further because it's a nice clear day, are Saturdays busier in the air?

It's not really standard HN material but I am curious, and I don't really have a way to tackle the problem beyond the guesswork above - and "some combination of them all" is a bit naff as an answer
The point I was making is that this particular flaw is indeed the same as the UPS flaw when considered at a high level - modifying a URL caused sensitive data to be disclosed.

In practical terms, of course the nature of data that is disclosed is relevant. AWS keys are incredibly valuable, and should be treated as such.
Trivia: This is written by Bram Moolenaar, maintainer of Vim (the trivia part is that he maintains Vim; hopefully it's quite clear that it was written by a guy named Moolenaar).
This is depressing but a realistic depiction of "how the other half programs".

What are your thoughts on what puts people into that programming underclass (which definitely exists)?
The irony always being that voting for president has arguably less DIRECT impact on our lives than voting for local government, but people get far more worked up over the big stuff
And in constitutional law, Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy (http://www.volokh.com/).
I'm pretty sure you completely misread that post.

"X is Y the same way that (false statement)" -> X is not Y
I am not saying there are not people within the giant Samsung company capable of this. I am sure there are.

I am saying they will be working against a strong "Samsung is good at hardware, but not at software" reputation.
I've done programming, functional management and product management. Today, I'm back to programming for exactly this reason. I work remotely, can take 20 minutes to run my kids somewhere or just to sit and listen to the latest problem at school that day. Given how little time I have left with my kids as kids (and how much I wasted chasing a "career"), this alone is worth as much as my salary.
You are definitely confusing the word troll, "A mythical, cave-dwelling being depicted in folklore as either a giant or a dwarf, typically having a very ugly appearance." (OED), with the word trawl: "1 an act of fishing with a trawl net or seine or 2. a thorough search". The parent comment actually mentioned trawling in his post, too, as a alternative Ars could've used.
Try F# 3.0
You're not taking growth into account - they're still more than doubling each year. You'd have to use the average user count to do math properly, not today's user count.
Why China is the World's Favorite Usual Suspect in Cyber Attacks
Nice to hear such an optimistic viewpoint. I find some comfortable truths in this essay, but he kind of glosses over some major things.

The moving targets that are the latest fads in languages (every six years a new "generation" does the same old thing their way) and shifts in market demand certainly create an environment requiring constant learning. Unless you're in business for yourself and taking on more risk and stress, your earnings will top out in the low six-figures so you have to value daily comfort and health insurance over any grand ambition or ability to disappear for months at a time. Outsourcing and immigrants willing to work longer hours for less money are a constant macro threat to this comfort zone too.

To say that it requires almost no education isn't true. An engineering or computer science degree surely makes it easier to get a job. Whether that training makes a difference at work if you started coding at age 9 anyway is debatable but a degree gets you recognition as a professional and shows that you have deep cross-training in math and physics.

I do agree coding non-mission critical applications is pretty low stress and for the most part you have a chance at a decent quality of life.
Simple blog system using Nodejs, Express, Mongoose, Markdown and Coffeescript
> a job with requirements that go on endlessly tops out at about $80,000/year

An endless list of job requirements is a sign the company doesn't know what it wants, so it's hardly surprising they don't know how much to pay their programmers, either.
This really hits on a key long term solution. A hobbyist could pick up a macbook pro, or already have one because they're trendy, and play around with Xcode and the simulator for a long time for free. Once the lightbulb flicks on and that hobbyist decides to plop down $99 for the paid account and signing certificate, releases one or two apps into the store, that developer is now a highly sought after asset to thousands of companies as a full time employee or contractor.

Where's the back-of-the-envelope calculations on spending $500-$1500 for a Mac and $99 for the Dev Account and turning that into a lifelong and highly valuable skill? It might be more money than $800 + $25 for the same on a Windows PC and Android, but it's not a huge difference when you compare the output. What other hobbies can be turned into a lucrative career with a soft cap of $2000 and 6 months to a year of practice?
I do hope more old technical books make it to a new life online. Otherwise whole areas will get increasingly hard to access, as there are only a limited number of library copies.
The virus scanner is designed to protect the mail server's clients.
I believe Tarsnap is your only viable option, if you want that enforce that degree of paranoia: http://www.tarsnap.com/
Ah, dead on! Those user figures are from August this year but the revenue is listed as 2011. Thanks.
I use the basic pomodoro method as explained in slide 6 of this deck with students retaking Maths who have experienced difficulty with the subject in the past.

They get one or two pomodoro's worth of routine questions each week to reinforce the lesson content. Works for them. The full method is quite sophisticated and includes review and optimisation templates. That won't work with teenagers!

The method allows a gentle increase in sophistication - you can just start using it with a timer one day to structure something boring (marking maths homework in my case, the mechanical marking not the reflective feedback to the student), then escalate your use of the rest of the method.

PS: plastic kitchen timers in the shape of cactus plants or retro clocks are readily available in UK.
Why not git bundle?
Rambling on the market for talent
I didn't originally intend to submit this here, but some of the replies at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4620276 changed my mind.

I apologize for the political leanings at the beginning and end, but I'm hoping the rest will spark an interesting conversation about the future of the market for programming talent.
Full-stack engineer at FutureAdvisor: reduce Wall Street's take of our savings
FutureAdvisor is an eight-person, Sequoia-backed startup remaking saving & investing for the average American family. Today customers already entrust us to advise them on $4 Billion in retirement assets.

Why this matters: Today big banks and brokerages siphon billions of dollars a year in fees from our collective 401(k)s and IRAs. We’re fixing this, with amazingly smooth user experiences built atop decades of finance research. Diligent, methodical software reduces costs, while our index-investing ethos increases returns in the long run. This is how wealthy families manage their money today, but because software scales better than people in suits, we can bring this world-class financial management to everyone.

We work with Rails, CoffeeScript, Sass, and a bit of Java, but we don't care if you haven't. We firmly believe that great engineers can learn any technology needed on the job - our first engineer spent years crafting operating systems in C++ before this.

Many talented engineers in finance end up spending their lives making the rich richer. Instead, come join us and use your talents to make millions of everyday families keep more of what's theirs.

We'd love to hear from you: hackernews@futureadvisor.com (note: job based in SOMA in SF)
Hi. I'm the author. I like it as it is. 10 is a list. 90 is a compilation of lessons. Thanks for your input though! Don't stop learning.
I'm a software developer (MS Comp. Sci.) in my late thirties. I've always had the impression that software development was really well paid. But lately many of my friends (doctors, lawyers, MBAs) has started to make way more than I can get as a regular employee. And for the doctors it's all part of their standard salaries. They don't need to demonstrate any particular high level of competence. And from here on their salary will increase until retirement, while I expect mine to flatten or decrease. I love programming and didn't choose it for the money, but my view on software as a high paying job has changed. Of course everything is relative.
I noticed the author speculating about color, so I colorized it based on the identity of the largest prime:

http://jsfiddle.net/HEHHj/2/

It actually uses the last prime drawn, so it's only useful in 'smallest first' mode. That ought to be fixed, but I was lazy about it.

Colorizing the image based on the largest prime makes the pattern intelligible a little bit longer, before it becomes impossible to tell the big primes apart.
State of Data #119
Agree. 90 times over.
It's not a competition, it's a lottery: "The winners will be chosen at random and notified via twitter."
Sure.

> "Port knocking by definition is an extra layer of security through obscurity"

Security through obscurity is not security, it's at best theater.

> "It protects against 0 day attacks on OpenSSH"

You substitute one problem for another, 0 day attacks on the SPA. Your model isn't safer, it's just different.

And personally, I trust the OpenSSH guys way more then any SPA vendor simply because they have a very good track record.
One of my friends is a 30something county prosecutor, pretty professional in most cases.

He took on the role of interim county drug czar for a few months, which sent him to raves/concerts/etc. We've got a picture of him wearing a "porn star" hat with neon jewelry and a pookah shell necklace; pretty fun to see one of our most professional friends acting out this role.
A lot of people seem to compare the earnings from one listening on spotify to the sale of a single...

Thing is, you have no idea how often that single is played. If the customer are crazy about it the musician would most likely earn more if he listened through spotify rather than buying it. If on the other hand the customer gets bored of it quickly the musician would barely get anything through spotify.

Also, one listening doesn't equal to a lost sale. Especially considering how easy (and wonderful) it is to just be able try new stuff out when there is no barrier or cost associated with it.

Musicians get waay more money from me thanks to spotify than they ever would get otherwise. And I bet there is a whole generation where this is/will be quite common.

There are winners and loser though, those artists that make songs that only last two weeks probably loose on spotify. I see that as a bonus.
The story about the office reminds me of one of the smartest people I have ever worked with, an investment banker.

His job was to research, audit and credit check companies in developing economies. He told me how within a few minutes of walking to the lobby of a company headquarters he could with some accuracy judge how the business was operated.

Lavish spending on insignificant things was a sign that there were inefficiencies or problems elsewhere. for eg. in one case a Russian investment fund had a large 3-level high marble lobby with a large bronze statue of the founder. Turned out that they were hundreds of millions in debt rather than wildly profitable as they had mis-priced assets.

The other anecdote he shared was that there seemed to be a high correlation between businesses that hired young, attractive secretaries in short skits and accounting fraud.
TIL your life is wasted if your treat your job as a job.
I see Arch as a kindler, gentler gentoo. So maybe not bleeding edge, but definitely an edge. You should only be there if you know why you want to be there.
A couple things that might affect air plane concentration are day of the week, time of the year, proximity to an airport, etc. You might not also see planes above clouds?
New PayPal TOS: No class actions against us
My trust in PayPal is certainly eroded by the new User Agreement, though I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Anyone have insight on what they're doing here? Just more slings and arrows against their userbase? Or something more nuanced?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear _____,

PayPal recently posted a new Policy Update which includes changes to the PayPal User Agreement. The update to the User Agreement is effective November 1, 2012 and contains several changes, including changes that affect how claims you and PayPal have against each other are resolved. You will, with limited exception, be required to submit claims you have against PayPal to binding and final arbitration, unless you opt out of the Agreement to Arbitrate (Section 14.3) by December 1, 2012. Unless you opt out: (1) you will only be permitted to pursue claims against PayPal on an individual basis, not as a plaintiff or class member in any class or representative action or proceeding and (2) you will only be permitted to seek relief (including monetary, injunctive, and declaratory relief) on an individual basis.

You can view this Policy Update by logging in to your PayPal account. To log in to your account, go to https://www.paypal.com and enter your member log in information. Once you are logged in, look at the Notifications section on the top right side of the page for the latest Policy Updates. We encourage you to review the Policy Update to familiarize yourself with all of the changes that have been made.

If you need help logging in, go to our Help Center by clicking the Help link located in the upper right-hand corner of any PayPal page.

Sincerely,

PayPal
$100s of millions (or more) were spent trying to copy WoW by many companies and almost everyone but blizzard failed miserably.
I would argue that if your team delivered good stuff, mostly on schedule, and your team was happy, then you were good at being a manager. The company failing despite your team deliver quality product hints that there was probably a flaw in strategic vision or external market factors.

Enjoying the role is another thing though.
Goedkoop genieten van een luxueuze cruisevakantie
Being able to web-search the answer is good.

Being able to recognise the correct answer in the sea of dross that is search engine results pages is better.

Being able to take the correct answer, and adapt it to what you need, and plugging it into what you already have, is best.

Do you really want to employ people who say they have X years of experience doing something but who cannot do a very simple task in the choice of their language? That's not a stupid trick gimmick question - there's no "gotcha" there. Perhaps we're getting caught up on the specific "reverse a string". Substitute that for something relevant to maintaining and building on a shitty web app.
I think this is the recorded media industry using the scourge of fake drugs to rally the roused rabble behind the American occupation of New Zealand and New York.
Bless you for making an installable product and not yet another pay-us-a-fiver-a-month service. If Mint's success is of any indication, there is a very substantial demand for productized analytics software.

[0] http://haveamint.com
Flagging is considerably lower, this account can flag comments and submissions so I think ~20 karma is required to flag.
I needed to keep it as easy as possible for friends to clone due to some not being too hot on Git so didn't want to send bundle files than them have to move it to somewhere they can use it (outside of an email attachment) then find it in terminal, then have to extract it... instead they run one line that's given to them and pow, they've got it.
tried, its good. keep adding new entries.
I'm 35 and I just recently started trying to turn what had been a hobby into something that pays. I harbor no illusions about ever making decent money at it though.
There is no such thing as "intrinsic value". All value is perception and subjective. Complicated arguments may enhance perceived value in others but keep in mind the subjective nature.

Once confidence collapses, "intrinsic value" flees out the door.